You come off a job, glance at your phone, and there's a missed call from a number you don't know. Was it a new customer? A big order? Someone selling you insurance?

You'll never find out. That's not a small annoyance — it's the entire reason this problem never gets fixed. A missed call leaves no evidence. There's no report, no line in the accounts, no angry email. Just a number you don't recognise and, somewhere across town, a competitor's van outside a house that was nearly yours.

Costs that leave no trace don't get managed. So let's put a number on it — your number, not a made-up one.

Why you can't trust the statistics on this

Search this topic and you'll find confident claims: some percentage of callers never ring back, missed calls cost UK business some enormous sum a year. Those figures get repeated between marketing blogs until they sound like facts, and almost none of them trace back to a study you can actually read. Most are a vendor's guess that acquired a decimal point.

We're not going to add to the pile. The useful number isn't an industry average — it's yours, and you can work it out in about two minutes with figures you already know.

Work out what a missed call costs you

Three numbers you already have, roughly:

One: what's an average job worth? Not your biggest ever. The ordinary one — the boiler service, the bathroom, the standard appointment. Say it's £250.

Two: how many enquiries turn into work? If ten people ring for a quote and three book, that's 30%. Most established trades sit somewhere between 20% and 50%. Use your gut; it's closer than you think.

Three: how many calls do you actually miss in a week? This is the one people get wrong, because you only count the ones you noticed. Check your call log properly — every unknown number you never rang back, plus everything that arrived while you were already on a call, plus evenings and weekends. For most one-van operations it's between five and fifteen a week. Call it eight.

Now: eight missed calls a week. Say half were customers rather than suppliers or spam — four. At a 30% conversion, that's 1.2 jobs a week. At £250, that's £300 a week. About £15,000 a year.

Run it with your own numbers. Even if you're brutal — even if you halve every assumption — the answer is usually thousands. Not because any single call is worth much, but because it happens every week, silently, forever.

The cost you can't put in the sum

The arithmetic above understates it, for a reason worth naming.

A new customer isn't one job. If they liked the work, they ring you for the next one, and the one after, and they tell their neighbour. The lifetime value of a good domestic customer to a trade business is many times that first invoice. So a missed call isn't a lost £250 — it's a lost relationship that would have compounded for a decade, handed to whoever picked up.

There's a reputational edge too. The caller doesn't know you were up a ladder. From where they're standing, a business that doesn't answer looks disorganised, over-stretched, or gone. That's unfair. It's also what people assume, and they'll mention it to the person who asks them for a recommendation.

Why the phone gets missed, and why willpower won't fix it

It's never carelessness. You're under a vehicle, mid-conversation with a customer, driving, or asleep. You cannot be the receptionist and do the work at the same time — those are two jobs, and you're doing the one that pays.

The usual fixes don't hold. Voicemail doesn't work because most people won't leave one; they hang up and dial the next name. Calling back later fails because a burst pipe doesn't wait an hour, and because the callback list quietly loses a few numbers every single day. And hiring someone is genuinely hard to justify — a part-time receptionist is real money every month for a call volume that doesn't fill their day.

That's the trap. Too many calls to keep missing, not enough to hire for.

What answering every call actually costs

RingSorted is £39 a month for 30 answered calls, then 49p for each extra one. Plus is £69 for 100 calls, then 39p. Unlimited is £99 with no per-call charge. All plus VAT.

Put that next to the sum above. If your missed calls are costing four figures a year — and for most businesses doing this exercise honestly, they are — then the entry plan pays for itself on roughly one saved job a year. Everything after that is work you'd otherwise never have known about.

It's also worth understanding why it's priced per call rather than per minute, because that's how most traditional answering services bill. Per minute, the meter runs while your customer explains their problem — so the calls that are most valuable to you, the detailed ones where you learn what the job actually is, are the ones that cost you most. You end up quietly wanting your receptionist to hurry people along. Per call, a call is a call. A thirty-second "do you cover Wakefield?" costs the same as four minutes of someone describing a leak properly.

What you get instead of a missed call

Your existing number diverts to RingSorted — customers keep dialling the number on your van, nothing on your marketing changes. It answers in your business's name within a couple of rings, asks the questions you've told it to ask, and sends you a written message: who called, their number, what they want, how urgent.

So instead of an unknown number and a shrug, you get something you can act on between jobs.

On Plus and Unlimited, when a caller genuinely needs a person, it transfers them straight through to a number you choose — your mobile, your partner's, whoever's on call. That transfer goes to you. There's no room full of our staff waiting to take over, and we'd rather say that plainly than let you assume otherwise. On the entry-level Lite plan there's no transfer at all: every call becomes a message. If you want a genuinely staffed team answering as your business, that's TNS365, the company behind RingSorted, and it's a different service.

Do the sum, then decide

Get your call log out. Count the unknown numbers from last week that you never rang back. Multiply by your job value and your conversion rate.

Whatever that number is, it's been happening every week for years, and it'll keep happening this week. That's the actual cost of a missed call: not the one you're looking at, but the fact that there'll be another one tomorrow.

Hear what your callers would get instead — ring 0330 9123 365, our own line, answered by RingSorted. Then start a free trial and stop wondering who that was.